


Five Sentences

by CrossedBeams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Drabbles, F/M, Fluff, MSR, Romance, prompts, short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 02:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9696533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: A collection of very short fluff/ angst MSR ficlets in response to a tumblr challenge whereby people left one word and I wrote a five (ish) sentence drabble in response. All standalone, ratings in comments





	1. Scrabble

**Author's Note:**

> S7 || Teen || Fluff

Mulder places the I tile with such flourish on the triple word score that Scully almost feels bad for what she’s about to do.

‘Invalid word,’ she smirks, and prepares for an argument as her partners lower lip pouts its disagreement.

‘Scully, Reticuli IS a real word, reticulans may not be proven to your exacting standards yet, but the star system is very real!’

Scully bites her lip at her hopeless, impetuous opponent and then delivers the death blow.

‘I’m not denying Reticuli is real Mulder, I _did_ take an astronomy elective, the word is invalid because it’s a proper noun,’ his face morphs from outrage to panic as Scully sit up to better observe her victory, her voice as sultry as her eyes are wicked.

'Lose the pants sweetheart.’


	2. Arms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || S8 || PG || Fluff

Medically speaking, Scully knows that they are just arms; three bones and an assortment of muscles and tendons that bridge the gap between his careful hands and the shoulders which too often carry the weight of the world they’ve inherited.

But there is more in the simple clasp of Mulder’s arms around her than in every medical textbook she ever read. 

Here is the spot where she hid from Pfaster, the reminder that she once shot him and was forgiven and the small scar from a childhood injection, this one visible though other memories cut much deeper. 

Here is the safety rope that pulled her back from a thousand disasters, the steadying hand in moments of weakness, the sharp elbow point of disagreement from meetings and  then thrust out in front of her to shield her from danger.

Here is her pillow, the weight that keeps her grounded in the night, the frame in which her head lies when he loves her in the dark, and under the skin his heartbeat, racing for her, for them both, the rhythm of their life driving his blood.

Perhaps they are just arms but she thinks of them as home.


	3. Drip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S6 || PG || Angst

It feels strangely unreal, the dryness of the tissue against her skin takes her back to a hundred times they stood just like this; him hovering with a too tight smile and her, statue still and stoic, just praying it would stop. When she was dying, each time had seemed more cataclysmic, a red stain memorialising cells lost and maybe never replaced. 

He’s carried tissues ever since.

But today there is no tragedy, just a dripping headcold for a miserable day on a dead-end case, and knowing he is waiting, Scully waves the white flag of the unbloodied kleenex with slightly more vigor than she feels. Mulder relaxes, unravels the tight knots that had started closing up his throat because at least for now she is not dying.

As they start again, side by side but never touching, Scully wonders if he’ll ever stop watching for her mortality long enough for them to live a life together.


	4. Daggoo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revival || Teen || Fluff/Humour

‘Get your dog out of my study Scully! Last time he came in here he peed on the yeti footprint castings and he has that look in his eye again - I wont have him chewing stuff and messing up my system!’

‘System Mulder?’ Scully’s feet are bare and her eyebrow is arched as she pads across to settle on the edge of his desk, ‘This mess is a system? Daggoo could file more effectively that you, and I don’t think getting up starting work at 5am is going to fix that!’

Mulder opens his mouth to argue but then he feels her toes slide up the leg of his sweatpants, notices skin beneath the lopsided buttoning of her flannel shirt and reads the invitation in her morning-blue eyes.

This time the folders scattering wantonly to the floor have nothing to do with an inquisitive mongrel.  


	5. Jellybean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S9 || PG || Angst

It’s that in-between time, where the light fails but the darkness hasn’t quite caught on, and the gas station door squeaks goodbye as Mulder crosses the forecourt to the car, one hand held behind his back. Two pairs of blue eyes, one small and hopeful and the other ready to be home, watch his progress and he smiles at their similarity.

Settling back into his seat he holds his tongue for the 3.1 seconds it takes William’s seven-year-old curiosity to override his patience, chestnut head poking between the seats to ask if he got any snacks.

‘Well’, Mulder answers, ‘Mom said healthy and you said candy and technically these are both,’ and he pulls out a bag of jellybeans to a squeal of delight from the backseat, and a snort and an eye roll from Scully, the kind that means he’s going to get a teasing kiss and a talking to later.

* * *

A passing express train rattles Mulder awake in his broken down trailer and it’s still that in-between time, but his love and his son are counting days half a country away, unsure if he’s alive or dead. In the half-light heartbreak, these simple dreams seem as far off as the dawn. 


	6. Reflection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revival || PG || Angst

It is the same mirror.

Twelve years melt to nothing in this same damp little basement bathroom; there is the same flickering strip light, the same cracked tile on the wall that she’d stared at whilst emptying her stomach and the last scraps of her innocence into the toilet during her chemo. Closeted by the familiar, Scully feels almost as if she could run back down the hall and find Mulder, floppy haired and flirty with his feet on his desk and two tickets to nowhere and the key to his heart held carelessly in one hand.

Until she sees her face and remembers. There are the years, the lines carved deep by loss and living, the sharper line of her cheekbones on a thinner face and the lips that have already known and tried to forget how he tastes.

The mirror is the same but the reflection is not.


	7. Roadtrip Music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pre-Revival || PG || Angst

The pick-up truck they bought for $400 cash in nowhere Missouri didn’t have much going for it but it had a functioning engine, unremarkable plates and it kept them ahead of the chasing shadows. Scully found the record button on the once cutting-edge cassette player by accident when scanning for a station and Mulder found the blank tapes quite deliberately in a dusty hardware store in Oklahoma; the first song he recorded was Stairway to Heaven and Scully rolled her eyes far enough he wondered if she could still see the road.

It turned into kind of a game, whoever wasn’t driving would snatch up songs they liked and burn them into the magnet, singing along loudly and saving the tapes for days where the only radio stations in range were the same ten gospel and country songs on repeat.

Mulder hadn’t known she’d kept the tapes until after she left, when he was looking for reminders that she had been there, a forgotten shirt that smelled of her or a note in her handwriting, and he’d found them stacked in a little box at the back of her closet.

He listened to them over and again, the giddy swing from rock to soul, funk to folk, carrying him away from the echoing house and back to a place where even when the worst seemed imminent, the wheels never stopped turning, and his redhead rode shotgun, singing flat and smiling. 


	8. Streetlights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S7 || MSR || Teen

It happened in the strangest way, the night the streetlight outside his apartment guttered and died. She woke in the darkness and something wild woke with her, some inky black need that wrote itself across her skin as she stood in his doorway and listened to him breathe. The bed springs were loud but her clothes whispered across her body before vanishing into the night. He woke on a half breath, half her name on his lips before she kissed it away and learned his body by touch, by taste and by the way he arched against her and brought her crashing down in flames.

She left before the light came back.


	9. White Tulips

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S5 Post Redux || PG || Fluffy Angst!

‘I always planned to carry white tulips on my wedding day,’ Scully tells him, absently running her thumb over the tender edge of a petal the way he’d like to touch her mouth.

‘And now?’ Mulder asks, hoping she’ll give him that look that will tell him it’s time but fearing it too, in case his heart stops and his legs give out.

But she shrugs, the movement catching on the cancer-sharpened bones of her shoulders and reminding him of the dark days and the tiny shard of metallic hope keeping her alive.

‘Now I don’t think of weddings,’ she says, and there’s no sadness in her voice, ‘I’m done planning for possible one-day futures. Now I have today, and then there’s tomorrow,’ and though she doesn’t say it  out loud, she catches his hand like she did in the hospital and her eyes tell him never to let go, because she has him too.


End file.
